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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

I agree, it's already lost.

The question then becomes -- since "crypto" no longer means "cryptography" -- what new shorthand term do we use?

You abandon the shorthand altogether, so that "cryptography" and "cryptocurrency" are distinguished the same way that "astronomy" and "astrology" are.

Which isn't a great place to be, as lay people confuse the two all the time.

I often confused astrology/astronomy as a child... but not as an adult.

Maybe some things simply can't be solved without education & maturity?

Frankly, you're reading HN, you can cope with it; a lot of people can't, and do confuse them as adults.

An extreme example - there was a paediatrician murdered (? At least something severe happened) in the UK after a newspaper published his name and occupation in connection with some more mundane story, and some idiot saw 'paed' and assumed all words with that prefix mean the same bad thing, or whatever.

Many people can't reliably tell you whether they bought something in a shop, or brought it home from a friend who gifted it to them.

Lack of intelligence and/or education can't be solved by modifying our language.

Of course not, I only meant that while yes you grew out of confusing them, many people don't; many people won't realise crypto isn't crypto.

A very appropriate analogy

I prefer to just keep using "crypto" and confuse the outsiders with my own crypto-jargon

This is actually my personal approach, because I'm a curmudgeon. If I'm talking about cryptography, I say "crypto". If I'm talking about cryptocurrency, I say "cryptocurrency".

Did you meant cryptic-jargon?

At least "cryptos" in plural is clearly for crypto currencies (I don't think anyone uses "cryptographies").

Just "crypto". Many words have multiple meanings, and we use context to figure it out.

"encryption"

Signatures, hash functions, message authentication codes, zero-knowledge proofs, authentication, etc. are all part of cryptography. They’re not “encryption” no matter how hard you try to stretch that word’s definition.

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